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Intersecting Race and Gender Cues are Associated with Perceptions of Gay Men’s Preferred Sexual Roles

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Abstract

Preferences for anal sex roles (top/bottom) are an important aspect of gay male identity, but scholars have only recently begun to explore the factors that covary with these preferences. Here, we argue that the gendered nature of both racial stereotypes (i.e., Black men are masculine, Asian men are feminine) and sexual role stereotypes (i.e., tops are masculine, bottoms are feminine) link the categories Asian/bottom and the categories Black/top. We provide empirical evidence for these claims at three levels of analysis: At the cultural level based upon gay men’s stereotypic beliefs about others (Study 1), at the interpersonal level based upon gay men’s perceptions of others’ sexual role preferences (Study 2), and at the intrapersonal level based upon racially diverse men’s self-reported sexual roles on a public hookup website (Study 3). These studies offer the first systematic evidence of linkages between race categories and sexual roles in gay male communities.

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Notes

  1. We excluded participants who failed to report their sexual orientation or indicated that they were straight (n = 2).

  2. We recruited fewer men for the gender condition than for the race and sexual role conditions because the gender ratings were fully within-subject (i.e., participants evaluated all traits on a continuous gender scale). Thus, fewer observations were required to achieve high power in the gender condition compared to the checklists in the other two conditions. Because gay men are somewhat difficult to survey in large numbers, this strategy helped to ensure appropriate power while being sensitive to the constraints of Mechanical Turk’s online sample.

  3. We calculated prior probabilities using combinatorics, which revealed that the chances of obtaining exactly two matches in a 10 word list given an original sample of 93 words is [C(10,3)*C(83,7)]/C(93,10) ≈ 22.0 % and the chances of exactly three matches is [C(10,4)*C(83,6)]/C(93.10) ≈ 6.2 %.

  4. We excluded participants who failed to report their sexual orientation or indicated that they were straight (n = 2).

  5. Most studies of gay men’s sexual role preferences, including the initial studies reported here, have focused on the categories “bottom” and “top.” To remain consistent with that work, we excluded profiles that listed “versatile” as their sexual role preference. Although it is an interesting phenomenon, a better understanding of sexual role versatility awaits future investigation.

  6. We also examined these effects with bottom, bottom/versatile, top/versatile, and top as separate categories. The pattern of results was conceptually identical to those presented above. Overall, sexual role preferences varied significantly across race categories, χ 2(6) = 70.50, p < .001. Among Asian men, 44 % identified as bottoms, 38 % identified as bottom/versatile, 10 % identified as top/versatile, and 7 % identified as tops. Among Black men, 2 % identified as bottoms, 10 % identified as bottom/versatile, 40 % identified as top/versatile, and 48 % identified as tops. Among White men, 16 % identified as bottoms, 28 % identified as bottom/versatile, 30 % identified as top/versatile, and 26 % identified as tops. Thus, we obtained similar results when analyzing the categories bottom and bottom/versatile and the categories top and top/versatile together and separately, buttressing our conclusions about the intrapersonal links between race categories and sexual role preferences.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (Lick) and National Science Foundation Grant BCS-1052896 (Johnson). We thank Michael O. Alfera for his assistance in calculating prior probabilities for Study 1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1285 Franz Hall, Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1563, USA

    David J. Lick & Kerri L. Johnson

  2. Department of Communication Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Kerri L. Johnson

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  1. David J. Lick
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Correspondence to David J. Lick.

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Lick, D.J., Johnson, K.L. Intersecting Race and Gender Cues are Associated with Perceptions of Gay Men’s Preferred Sexual Roles. Arch Sex Behav 44, 1471–1481 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0472-2

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